Instant messaging is a very popular form of communication in today's internet driven world. As such, numerous people may be invited to participate in an ongoing instant message chat session. However, it may be difficult for the invitee to gain a full understanding of the context of the conversation without reading the preceding messages or without the people already in the chat providing a summary. As expected, the invitee may not want to join a meeting where the subject is not of particular interest.
Similarly, in virtual worlds an avatar may enter a space where an ongoing conversation is occurring that was previously out of range of the avatar. In order for the avatar to get the gist of the conversation he/she must wait and catch up with the ongoing conversation.
Known solutions such as persistent chat may require that the person read back over the conversation in order to get the gist of what is being discussed, which may be time consuming and distracting from the ongoing conversation. Other known solutions such as highlighting keywords in the persistent chat may suffer from similar difficulties in that the person must look back over the entire chat to determine what is being discussed.